Introduction:
Corporate travel is different from personal trips. It involves managing flights, hotels, and other services provided by travel companies efficiently while maintaining costs. B2B travel platforms play a very important role here in streamlining the whole process for business, travel managers, and employees.
Understanding Corporate Travel Management
Corporate travel management involves planning and optimizing a company’s need to travel. This involves:
- Booking flights and hotels.
- Following travel policies.
- Ensuring traveler safety.
- Keeping track of expenses and reports.
Corporate travel is much more regulated than personal travel, with pre-approved budgets, preferred suppliers, and safety requirements.
What is a B2B Travel Platform?
A B2B travel platform is a digital tool that assists businesses in their corporate travel management. A B2B travel platform, therefore, puts everything on one page, making a company able to:
- Book flights and hotels.
- Follow travel policies.
- Monitor budgets and expenses.
These B2B travel platforms collect traveling data from airlines, car rentals, hotels, etc. This makes it easier for employees to have a seamless traveling experience.
Who Uses a B2B Travel Platform?
B2B corporate travel platforms are designed purposefully to fulfill the unique needs of business users. Essentially, there are three tiers of end-users.
Corporate travel managers (CTMs) deals with all types of travel bookings and policies; they mostly make flight bookings, accommodations, and other services particularly for groups of travelers and higher tiered employees. They develop the company travel policy, process employee-related travel expense and handle claims for reimbursement.
Business travelers may use the platform to self-book travel within company guidelines. After their trips, they submit expenses and their detailed itineraries.
Finance departments are the stakeholders who audit the travel expenses to ensure adherence to company policies and harness travel data for budget projections and cost-saving insights. It revolves around reporting, analytics, and oversight features.
How Do These Platforms Work?
B2B travel platforms have multiple modules that manage key functions, such as:
- Supplier Management: Connecting with airlines, hotels, and car rentals to provide the best options.
- Inventory Management: Organizing travel services into a user-friendly format for easy booking.
- Booking Management: Ensuring smooth booking, approval, and payment processes.
Supplier management
Supplier management deals with monitoring and optimizing connections between the platform and suppliers, for example, travel services providers, such as airlines, hotels, and car rentals. However, when it comes to corporate travel management, access to a huge inventory is just not enough but also a strategic choice and management of suppliers tailored to business traveler’s requirements.
So supplier management for B2B corporate travel platforms involves a combination of the following things.
- Supplier selection – Choosing suppliers based on their offers, such as cost, convenience, quality, and reliability, such as airlines that have frequent business routes, hotels near business districts, and car rental services for corporate clients.
- Integration methods: There are various integration methods of supplier connection for the smooth management of varied suppliers.
- Manual data entry through CMS (Content Management System): Data can be manually managed for niche suppliers whose offerings are unique and essential for businesses.
- Extranet connection: The extranet is meant for suppliers who do not have automated APIs or traditional GDSs. They can update their content, such as rates and availability, through the extranet.
- Central Reservation System (CRS) connection: Most of the bigger suppliers-including hotel chains- use their own CRS. B2B will have an almost direct access to such information as live inventory, real rates, and bookings information straight from a supplier’s CRS, thereby streamlining much of its management over that suppliers.
- Channel manager connection: Channel managers are third-party systems that aggregate inventory data from multiple suppliers. A B2B platform can manage these suppliers more efficiently by connecting to a channel manager instead of configuring separate connections to each supplier.
- Wholesaler connection: Wholesalers or bed banks are the ones that bridge the gap between B2B travel platforms and numerous smaller or independent hotels. Through these links, there are different accommodation options, from mainstream hotels to boutique establishments suitable for different business traveler’s preferences.
- GDS connection: GDSs aggregate and then distribute travel inventory from myriad suppliers, including airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and more. They can be a good starting point for accessing a wide variety of options. However, the filters can be applied by corporate platforms to present business travel results in a more manageable way.
Inventory management
Inventory management is a B2B travel platform component which collects information about various travel services from multiple suppliers and presents it in an easily accessible format for corporate travel departments to book. It acts as the platform’s “storefront,” showcasing various services users can explore and reserve.
The inventory management process begins after supplier relationships have been built and maintained with the use of the supplier management feature. The operation here includes extracting information from various suppliers, like airlines providing easy flight times, hotels close to business districts or MICE venues, and transport options that prioritize efficiency and punctuality.
Since suppliers are many and different, corporate B2B platforms focus on standardizing the collected data for usage in a business environment. Services have to be categorized and must be aligned with company travel policies. One option may be filtered for price caps, preferred vendor agreements, or even eco-friendliness for companies that support environmentally friendly travel.
Booking management
The real journey begins once the inventory from various suppliers is pooled and organized. Whether it’s a CTM overseeing multiple employees’ travels or an individual business traveler making their own arrangements, the platform’s user-centric booking engine steps into action.
Back to our topic, here’s a snapshot of how a typical corporate travel booking flow unfolds.
User authentication and role identification: A secure login ensures that the platform’s environment is tailored to the user’s role and aligns with the permissions and associated privileges.
Travel search and selection: Advanced search functionality allows users to browse through large inventories quickly. The system ensures that only policy-compliant options are surfaced, thereby streamlining the selection process.
Policy сompliance and approval. Many corporations have layered approval workflows, particularly for high-ticket bookings. The system automates these checks and sends bookings to managers for approval when required.
Booking and payment: Once travel options are finalized and (if required) approved, the user proceeds to the payment. Depending on the company’s arrangement, this could be done through a corporate credit card, a departmental budget, or even the employee’s card (to be reimbursed later). The platform securely processes the transaction and confirms the booking with the supplier.
Itinerary and travel details: Post-booking, the platform generates a detailed itinerary sent to the traveler. CTMs dealing with multiple bookings can access, manage, and distribute these itineraries as required. Many platforms also allow integration with personal or corporate calendars, automatically adding travel details. This ensures reminders, check-in prompts, etc.
Post-travel expense management: The journey doesn’t end once the trip concludes. Business travelers can submit additional expenses, which are then streamlined through approval workflows for reimbursement.
The backbone of this entire flow is the platform’s robust interface, ensuring CTMs and business travelers alike can navigate and manage their travels efficiently.
Conclusion:
B2B travel platforms are the backbone of corporate travel, simplifying complex processes for businesses and employees. In Episode 2, we’ll dive deeper into the core features of these platforms, including how they manage disruptions, expenses, and reporting.
